#99: Fantasy Leagues
With the calendar now flipped to August and the start of the NFL preseason a mere two weeks away, the air has that familiar smell to it once again; the smell of pigskin spiraling through the air, the smell of artificial FieldTurf melting in the August sun and the smell of people with questionable personal hygiene pouring over countless fantasy football magazines looking for that all elusive Sleeper Pick.
There’s something so alluring about owning your own imaginary team made of real-life players that captures the hearts, minds and free-time of millions of sports fans every year. Whether it’s fantasy football, fantasy baseball or fantasy basketball, we just can’t get enough of this fantasy world. We spend hours upon hours thinking of the perfect draft-day strategy, ranking players by their value, stalking the waiver wires for that one perfect player to fill that hole in the line-up, or coming up with the best possible way to rip off the guy in last place with the most lopsided and uneven trade you can think of.
The reason why fantasy leagues are so popular can be traced to just about every sports fan’s deep-rooted desire to own his or her own team. I guarantee you that if you ask sports fans, “what’s the first thing you would do if you won the lottery tomorrow”, more than 75% of them would tell you that they would go out and buy a professional sports team. It’s just the way it is. All of us have that dream of sitting in a cushy suite high above the field in a three-piece suit watching our team down below (or pacing the sidelines like a plastic robot, much like Jerry Jones). All of us have seen a bad trade go down, or watched our team blow a draft pick on a foreign center with an unpronounceable name and wished we were in the owner’s position so that we could do it differently.
That’s the beauty of fantasy sports, being the owner, GM and coach of your own team. You draft the players, you get to say who plays and who sits on the bench and you get to talk trash to your best friend over the internet when he forgets to change his line-up and accidentally starts Kyle Orton over Tom Brady. It’s all in good fun, and the best part is, YOU CAN WIN MONEY!!! Who doesn’t love winning money? Better yet, who doesn’t love winning money AND being able to hold it over everyone else’s head for a solid 6 months? Nobody, that’s who. Bragging rights and a fat pay-out for winning your league, as well as being able to convince yourself that you are a sports genius.
What I enjoy most about fantasy sports, namely fantasy football, is the fact that it gets me about 150% more involved with games and teams I wouldn’t normally involve myself with. Before fantasy football, I cared about the Giants and only the Giants on Sundays. Now, I find myself updating NFL.com on my iPhone every 5 minutes on Sundays. I check scores and stats obsessively, calculating fantasy point totals in my head on the fly like a football-crazed version of Rain Man. What’s the score of the Texans-Bears game? Who cares? I CARE. I care very much because I need Andre Johnson and Matt Forte to score at least 20 points each, that’s why.
You see, it’s addicting, and it makes games you normally would care less about, a lot more exciting. Plus, you start to care about your players after a whole season following their every move. You start to appreciate the ones who perform for you week in and week out and you start to despise the ones who decide to rack up a 35-point day the one week you sit them on the bench. Fantasy football is a funny thing, and I can’t wait to get started on a new season. I won’t tell you who I’m picking first though.
